Palm Beach photographer, mentor take viewers to imperiled places

Dede Pickering’s photographs are in an exhibition at the Center for Creative Education. Pickering spotted this man carrying a melon during an early morning at a market in Cuzco, Peru in 2014. “I saw this burst of green melon up against a red door and his hand,” she said. “It was a one-shot image.”

Pickering, of Palm Beach, has traveled to more than 100 countries on six continents.

Her mentor, Palm Beach Gardens resident Resnick, is a professional photographer, teacher and consultant whose clients include National Geographic, Apple, Adobe, Nikon, Epson and others. He has logged hundreds of thousands of miles trekking to Antarctica, Iceland, Greenland, Namibia, Chile and other distant places.

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Dede Pickering photographed this boy with a red umbrella in 2013 at a temple in Myanmar. “I loved the way he was looking upward with that wondering, mysterious gaze,” she said. “But really it was about the color of the image.”

Two Visions, One World features 50 images from each photographer. Although the photographers have visited some of the same places, they see them with different eyes.

“I’m people, he’s places,” Pickering said.

But both photographers are drawn to subjects that are changing fast and might vanish forever.

Pickering’s contributions include richly colored images of an Asian boy haloed in red, a man whose head seems to have been replaced by a melon and a man paddling a sampan in a mist-shrouded lake.

Resnick’s photographs focus on the dramatic colors and contours of nature, such the abstract patterns reflected in an ice river in Greenland and bare trees buffeted by a sand storm in Namibia.

Although he’s adept with photography software, he doesn’t manipulate his images. “It’s really what this stuff looks like,” he said.

Pickering found her calling when she merged her love of travel and photography with her philanthropic work on behalf of women and children in the developing world.

“My photographs are meant to be a bridge between cultures and to express the universal human spirit,” she said.

She prefers places “where there are few footsteps,” she said. Most of her images were shot in Cuba; South America; and the mountainous regions of Kashmir, Myanmar and Bhutan.

“The small pockets of indigenous people are disappearing,” Pickering said. “With each trip I take, I see change.”

Resnick, who began his career as a photojournalist, retains the habits of a reporter.

“One of my goals is to raise people’s consciousness about how fragile the environment is through the spectacle of my images,” he said. “If people stay interested, they will do their homework.”

He’s surprised by how much of the story isn’t told by major news outlets. “When you travel the world, you see there’s a much-bigger picture,” he said.

For example, during a 2014 trip to Greenland with other photographers, he invited a local politician on board their ice breaker to discuss how he viewed his village’s future.

The politician didn’t talk about global warming. Instead he enthused about pumping hot water from underground onto the ice to melt it so that miners could get at the rich mineral deposits beneath it. American oil companies are involved in the quest, Resnick said.

Few will follow in Pickering’s and Resnick’s footsteps. But through their images viewers might walk away with a better understanding of cultures and places whose days might well be numbered.

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